Written By: Karla Jo Helms

Domination on the Internet

One of the first things I did for one of my clients several years ago was figure out how to get her positioned as an expert online. She had a wealth of information on a subject and was quite the expert. What she wanted was valuable "organic" links pointing back to her website. So I rolled up my sleeves to try and figure out how to do this. When it was all said and done, she had 6500-plus sites carrying her content and all linking back to her site "organically." Of course we had others working on this project full time so we were able to create this kind of volume for her, but you can just as easily do the same. By the way, none of these links were paid nor shared links - they were totally organic.

I wish that I could write an elaborate hat for you to let you know all the work I have done and the research on the web I have labored over to figure this out, but when it boils down to it, it is really simple and fairly brief to describe. What is does take, though, is diligence and patience and a willingness to outflow and do this activity newly every day.

So, here goes…

What is Article PR

Back in the day before I even knew what an article bank was, I was finding article directories that I described as "article clearing houses". There was not even a term to define them. They took articles that one wrote and placed them on their website when the authors submitted them. Others could come and use these articles free of charge for their sites, ezines, blogs, newsletters, e-newsletters, etc. This is a practice that has gotten more and more popular over time – more and more people doing it and more and more article directories (banks, clearing houses, etc.) popping up. I don’t see an end to it. Now some are trying to make money off their site by offering other services.

[Note: Ezines are electronic magazines. Blogs are web logs — like a personal diary posted on the web. E-newsletters are electronic newsletters. E-magazines are electronic magazines. You get the picture.]

Now what is an article bank? It is a storage place on the web of content. Articles. The articles have to be helpful in nature, written by the person submitting them or by an authorized representative and must not further violence, perverted activity or any other immoral type of activity. The banks would then allow webmasters (another name for someone that handles one’s website) to search, view and use free of charge the articles. The only stipulation being that the user agrees that he/she will keep the author’s bio and website link in tact with the article. Some sites allow one to use parts of the articles if they don’t want to their whole, but with the same stipulation. Editors, publishers, bloggers, etc. also use these articles for the content they need, so there is always a plethora of content needed on a variety of subjects, specialty subjects and so forth.

The purpose of articles on these sites is to increase the quality of content to the site. Your purpose for submitting your article to them is to get organic links back to your site and make sure content available to others who might need and use it. It’s good PR for you and increases you/your company’s credibility.

This content cannot be gibberish — it has to be relevant to the site and be quality content. This increases organic (not paid) search engine rankings. The actual keywords that people most readily use to search for and find your company should be in your articles regularly throughout. Use this datum with caution. You don’t want to sound corny or trite. Try to make sure you put your keywords in your title — if it fits and doesn’t lose the communication. The main point here is utilize your keywords (search terms) without lowering the quality of your communication in your articles. I am not an SEO expert, but this is what I have gleaned from reading articles and talking to experts. In fact it is the simplest way to describe what you have to do regarding search terms - plus it’s just plain common sense.

How to get started

The best way to get started is to write or have written 10 articles. Why 10? It is a good round number. After you have written the first 10, write 15 more right after that. While you are writing the remaining 15, the first 10 are being submitted to all the article banks. So in reality, 25 is the best number to launch with – I just wanted to give you a step-by-step approach to getting started. But basically do what you are comfortable with - be as aggressive as you wish.

These articles must be a helpful and the title should be compelling. Don’t add any "self-puffery" at all — if you do your articles will get turned down by the article banks and plus it will make you seem like you are too self-aggrandizing. You also cannot duplicate content in your articles – like using the same article, just changing a few things to make it seem like a new article. You will be denied authorization to publish your article on the same site.

How long should your articles be? 500-600 words are good to start out. A lot of sites now want minimum 500 words. 800 is more preferable. Sometimes 1200 word count works great for some articles. It depends on the subject. Do not make the paragraphs long. And always include a bio for the author with a link to your website at the bottom. Do not put hyperlinks (links to sites) within the body of your text. Bios should not be long either — say, 250 characters.

Where to find Article Banks

Next, instead of doing it the hard way — which is what I did because of two reasons:

1. I didn’t know and

2. The article banks were just developing (told ya it was "back in the day") — Google (go to www.google.com) and type in "article directories"/"article banks". There will be a list of article directory (article bank) links to go to to start submitting articles. Today there are A LOT.

Pick 10. Go to each site. Make a folder for each one. Read their guidelines — article length, number of submissions allowed per day/week, bio restrictions, etc., etc. Follow these rules. It is good manners plus you don’t want to piss them off. Many of these article banks are owned by the same people — you get ousted from one — you get ousted from several. And who knows who they know, right?

After you have read their submission guidelines, start setting up accounts with them. They will or should be free. I never submit to any I have to pay — usually if you do have to pay is it a paid distribution service which I will get to later. Skip those for now.

Choose a user name and password that you will remember. And make it one that you can use for all article bank sites. Usually the user name is the author. I would do it that way anyway because what I have found is that if you are not the author (even though you may be a ghost writer) the site’s format program will list you as the author. And then you have to go through the hassle of contacting them and getting them to fix it. Sometimes this will be impossible because these sites are automated and run with a part-time person who never responds to you. But that doesn’t matter if you do it right because your name, bio, company name and link will be published on their site only to increase the number of sites that are carrying your content.

Log in and start submitting from your Word document files. Just copy and paste. Paste into Notepad first - sometimes Word tends to carry code with it when you cut and paste directly from it which creates funny symbols and characters you don’t want.

Some sites will ask you for keywords – those are the keywords that should be entered if someone were to search for the topic of your article. This is not the same thing as the keywords for your website. It is the keywords for your article, which may or may not be the same for your website.

Say I have an article about how to apply makeup if you are nearsighted women and wear glasses. My keywords might be nearsighted, eyeglasses, women and makeup. Or better yet, it might be nearsighted makeup application – yes, it can be a term (more than one word). Many times keywords are longer terms (and sometimes downright sentences) as your internet users are getting wise to the fact that their searches can be narrowed by being more specific. I think the average now is 5 words in a search term. But if you are writing an article about your optometric practice or some other optical business, most likely you will have data that is relevant to your business and makes sense for you to add your own website keywords into the article so when people search that those keywords, they read your great advice article and get directed to your website. It establishes credibility and also leads people to your business to potentially buy. So it’s a two-fold benefit.

Next, you may be asked for a ‘lead in’ — something that would make one want to read your article. You may pick a line out of your article that leads someone on to want to read your article — or you may have to write one. Whatever it is, make it enticing. Make them want to read your article. Don’t tell them what the article is all about in that leader, just a teaser.

How to Track Your Submissions

There are more sophisticated ways of doing this - this method is just something you can do to get started. After submitting the articles make a spread sheet in Excel with several columns. One for date submitted; one for date published; one for website name; one for article name; one for author; one for website address; one for notes about that site — your user name and password, maybe how you found it, any particular notes you would want to remember. Make the website names different colors so that when you go back to submit more articles in the future, once you have more written, you an easily see which sites have what articles. I do the same for each author — giving them a certain color. That is if you have more than one author. You can even make a spread sheet within that one as Sheet 2 as the list of new sites publishing your content. Then you can easily see how many are posting your work. These are non-reciprocal links to your site — very valuable and considered more valuable by far than shared links. It means people find your content useful and are using it.

(And for even more organization you can even make a Sheet 3 that lists all the banks down on the left, and all the articles at the top from left to right, and then put a ‘yes’ underneath each article for each site that you get to publish that article… then you know who has what and what articles you have left to go. You might need to draw this out to really understand it or just create a sample spreadsheet in Excel.)

That is really the lot of it. But as you go, you will usually see — if you scroll down the web page of each article bank site — links to other sites that company also owns and operates. Some are more article bank sites. Be alert to these and go to those sites and see if those are sites you can also submit to. If you don’t have time at that moment, bookmark it to get back to it when you do have time.

Next, continue to go back to Google to exhaust the article banks that it lists.

Getting Alerted When Others are Linking Back to You

Next set up a Google Alert on your company’s name or its website address or even the author. Go to Google and enter ‘Google Alerts’ and you will be directed to the area that explains how to do this. Google will alert you when its search engine "spiders" crawl around the web and find your content/link on other sites that you did not submit to directly yourself (but picked up your content from one of the sites you submitted to), as well as the sites you submitted to directly. "Spiders" are computer programs/algorithms (really complicated math formulas) that find what content is out there that is new and what it is linked to. It is basically like a sophisticated cataloguer of the internet and indexes what is being published online.

By checking your exposure online via Google, you will then see other sites that you can now submit more articles to. Some may not be article banks and may only be a website of a company, or a blog, or an ezine, etc. But they are using your content which is great; and they may or may not want more content from you. Email them and see if they would like more of your articles. If they do, submit. If not, be polite and thank them for posting your article(s) to begin with.

Also search the search engines yourself to see where your articles end up. Don’t just reply on the spiders. Spiders may not catch everything before they circle around again so MSN, Yahoo, Ask.com, Bing, etc. should be checked. There are more search engines – use what you want. Use your company’s name, website address, author’s name, etc. to see what comes up. Using the quotation marks around the search terms eliminates superfluous search results not pertinent to your search.

Some Minor Details

1. You also might need a ‘permission to publish clause’. Some article banks require that you give the conditions by which others may use your articles. This should be a simple one-to-two liner. "You may have permission to publish this article free of charge as long as the author’s name and byline stays in tact. Notification of its use and where it is published would be greatly appreciated."

2. Never submit to sites that then own your articles and you no longer do. Most all sites will allow the author to retain full rights to his/her articles.

3. Watch out for SPAM sites. These are sites that take your content and put hyperlinks all through your articles to paid ads for OTHER businesses - like your competitors.

Paid Distribution Sites

After you have done this for a while and gotten a feel for it, then you can go to article distribution sites and have them distribute your articles for a fee. Why do it on your own first? There is so much to learn and the web is constantly changing that if you just let others do it you would never learn the ins and outs. There is so much data that I could never give you in a nutshell. It is its own universe and you have to get in it and learn it and wrap your wits around it to get control of it. Once you feel that way or close to it, as one never really gets on top of it forever before it changes out from underneath you (but you can get familiar with it to be causative — and you should), go to paid distribution sites like www.isnare.com. Pay them about $1 per article (or less) to distribute your articles to many other article banks, article announcement groups, ezines, blogs, etc. that you haven’t been able to find on your own.

(By the way, it doesn’t take long to wrap your wits around this – today it is much easier and simpler than it was 6-7 years ago — mainly because there are so many article bank sites now and so many people doing it and many of them directories use the same format.)

Note: Distribution sites are only as good as the other directory sites that will accept their content. Many sites regard these mass submissions as SPAM and reject them. Others post them, but there is no format and the entire article is bunched together with no paragraphs, so it is not readable thus degrading the content of your articles. You should never pay a lot of money at distribution sites — there are too many variables and they cannot guarantee your articles will be accepted, is a waste of money really.

Keep on Truckin’

Continue writing and submitting. Get your presence known on the web. Look at other authors at the article banks sites that have submitted many articles. Google their names and see where all they are published — see if those are the right forums (sites) for you. If so, utilize those sites, publish on them and get your content out.

Remember: post all of you articles on your own site and make it available to others to use in the same way that the article banks do... except that you do not have to accept others’ articles. That’s your prerogative.

Another great resource about this subject is via the article The Rise and Rise of Article PR - What are the Implications?

I hope this helps you — happy submitting!